Subjects

De Lavallade, Faison & Wilkinson reflect on Janet Collins & their careers

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 COLLAGE

Panelists include Carmen de Lavallade, George Faison, and Raven Wilkinson.

Sunday, September 20th 2PM
Barnes & Noble, 150 East 86th Street (86th & Lexington Ave.), New York, NY
212-369-2180

Moderated by author Yaël Tamar Lewin, to celebrate the paperback edition of Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins.
A panel of renowned artists will reflect on Collins and her career, and discuss their own experiences as African-American performers in a racially segregated United States. There will also be a brief reading from the book and a screening of historical film clips.

Carmen de Lavallade is an award-winning dancer, choreographer, and actress. She performed with the Lester Horton Dance Theater and Alvin Ailey Dance Company and has appeared on Broadway (House of Flowers) and off (Othello, Death of a Salesman), as well as in film (Carmen Jones, Odds Against Tomorrow). Janet Collins was her first cousin and a great inspiration to de Lavallade, who danced some of her roles at the Metropolitan Opera. De Lavallade was also wife and dance partner to the late Geoffrey Holder.

George Faison is a celebrated dancer, choreographer, and producer who was the first African American to win a Tony Award for Best Choreography—which he received for The Wiz in 1975. He has also worked with popular entertainers such as Ashford & Simpson, Patti LaBelle, Dionne Warwick, and Earth, Wind & Fire. In addition, Faison is the artistic director of the Faison Firehouse Theater, a performing arts and cultural center that seeks to preserve Harlem’s historic past.

Raven Wilkinson was the first African-American dancer with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which she joined in 1955, becoming a soloist in her second season. When performing in the American South, she wore white makeup to conceal her race. After her identity was revealed, she faced threats from the KKK. She left the company in 1961 and went on to work with the Dutch National Ballet and New York City Opera.

 

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/504146629740543/

#tbt: Young Union “Soldiers”

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Today’s Throwback Thursday images are from the book Heroes for all Time: Connecticut Civil War Soldiers Tell Their Stories. These photographs depict two rather young Union “soldiers”.

 Children

The name of boy on the left has been lost to history. He was most likely a former slave who sought shelter with Union soldiers. Many such boys and young men became servants to Union soldiers—cooking, washing clothes, cutting wood, and tending to gear. Some traveled North after the close of the war, to continue working as attendants in the homes of returning soldiers. On the right is Robert Morton, who worked as a servant for Union soldier Robert Potter during the war. As with many African American people who hired themselves to Union soldiers, little is known of his life.

 Adobe Photoshop PDF

Nationwide, and in Connecticut, Sesquicentennial Commemorations of the Civil War are Winding Down.
Wesleyan author Matthew Warshauer has played a large role in the Commemoration efforts here in Connecticut. He is co-chair ofthe Connecticut Civil War Commemoration Commission, author of Connecticut in the American Civil War, and editor of Inside Connecticut and the Civil War. The authors of Heroes for All Time will be at both of the Connecticut events listed below, answering questions about Connecticut soldiers and signing copies of their book—which if full of interesting stories such as those of the two boys photographed above.

August 29th & 30th
After four years of amazing events and an impressive range of new scholarship and understanding of Connecticut’s important role in the Civil War, the Civil War Commemoration is coming to a close during the last weekend of August, 2015. You can join the Connecticut Civil War Commemoration Commission at scenic Bauer Park (Madison, CT) for the final Commission sponsored encampment of the 150th anniversary commemoration. The event will feature hundreds of re-enactors and displays. Be there for the last great battle on Saturday and the official closing ceremonies on Sunday. You can find more information here.

September 12th
Join the Middlesex County Historical Society for a day of history, music, and remembrance in the back yard of the General Mansfield House. The featured speaker will be Edward Ball, acclaimed author of Slaves in the Family, winner of the National Book Award. Tom Callinan, Connecticut’s first State Troubadour, will be on hand to sing popular songs from the Civil War era, as well as original compositions. Re-enactors will portray civilians and soldiers from Company F of the 14th CVI. They will demonstrate camp life including drills, cooking over campfires, and other activities necessary to the operation of an army of the period. You can find more information here.

Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins

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Janet Collins (1917–2003) was a renowned dancer, painter, and the first African-American soloist ballerina to appear on the stage of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It took her many years of resolve, facing the blatant racism that existed in the dance community (as it did elsewhere in the United States), to achieve the status of prima ballerina at the Met. In fact, at age 15 she was offered a position with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, with the caveat that she would “paint her face white.” Collins declined. But she did not give up.

 Lewin-Night R-72-3rule

Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins, recipient of the Marfield Prize,
the National Award for Arts Writing, and now available in paperback.
The first two chapters are comprised of Collins’s unfinished autobiography.

 larger collage

 

The black dancing body was welcome on American and European stages of the mid-twentieth century, but usually only in forms of popular entertainment that perpetuated African-American stereotypes: the comic, the streetwise, and the exotic primitive. These stereotypical characters were found in minstrel shows and vaudeville, as well as on Broadway and in Hollywood movies. Pioneers like Edna Guy, Hemsley Winfield, and Katherine Dunham paved the way for African-American dancers in the arena of Modern dance, but the world of ballet remained closed, its movement vocabulary deemed too refined for black performers. In addition to the stereotypes of being too raw, too sensual, and too primal, blacks also had to contend with an irrational judgment of their physiques. White dance directors and choreographers deemed the black dancing physique as incompatible with ballet’s technical and aesthetic demands, assuming that they somehow lacked the grace and precision necessary to succeed in ballet.

Night’s Dancer tells the story of Janet Collins, who helped to pave the way for positive change in the dance world. She remains an inspiration today, due to her artistry, courage, and perseverance. Biographer Yaël Tamar Lewin, who is also a dancer, does not shy away from the darker corners of her life. Lewin discusses Collins’s battle with depression, the sterilization she underwent as a young woman, and the hard-hitting rejection she faced because of her skin color. Lewin does not merely focus on Collins’s long struggle to break the race barrier. Drawing on extensive research as well as interviews with Collins, her family, friends, and colleagues, Lewin chronicles her life as a well-rounded and accomplished artist, a true pioneer in her choreographic work. Collins fused styles, topics, and music in new ways. She also was a talented painter.

Wesleyan University Press is not alone in recognizing the talents and achievements of Janet Collins. She is also the subject of Dancing in the Light: The Janet Collins Story, a new short animated film narrated by Chris Rock and produced by Karyn Parsons for Sweet Blackberry. Carmen de Lavallade, an accomplished dancer, choreographer, and Yale University professor, is working on a feature film about her talented cousin. De Lavallade is collaborating with actress/producer Roberta Haynes and writer Jenny Callicott on the film, Prima: The Janet Collins Story. Their website explains: “So many events in today’s news remind us that it is increasingly important to remember the struggles of the civil rights movement.” And asks: “[W]hy is it that Janet Collins’ amazing accomplishment of becoming the first black prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera a story that remains untold?”

Collins’s story is still very relevant. In her memoir, Misty Copeland (now principal dancer at American Ballet Theater) noted that “[t]here were many people who seemed not to want to see black ballerinas, who thought that our very presence made ballet less authentic, less romantic, less true. The bitter truth is I felt that I wasn’t being fully accepted because I was black, that leaders of the company just didn’t see me starring in more classical roles, despite my elegant line and flow.” Collins was among a small, dedicated group of black dancers who helped pave a difficult road for talents such as Copeland.

Janet Collins has been widely recognized as one of the finest dancers in America. Her artistic and personal influences continue to shape the dance world today, not only due to her perseverance, but also due to her great talent and creativity as a dancer and artist.

Photo credits, all found in Night’s Dancer: 1 & 2: Collins in Spirituals. Photo @ Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 3: Painting of a young girl by Collins. Courtesy of the estate of Janet Collins. 4: Painting of a woman with magnolias by Collins. Courtesy of the estate of Janet Collins. 5: Collins with Hanya Holm, Don Redlick, and Elizabeth Harris, 1961. Photo by Bob McIntyre. Courtesy of Don Redlich. 6: Collins surrounded by her art. Betty Udesen/The Seattle Times. Featured image: Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust and the Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

#tbt: Aimé Césaire, “ no race has a monopoly on beauty…”

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This week’s  Throwback Thursday selection is an excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s long poem Notebook of a Return to a Native Land (2001), edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Wesleyan University Press also published a bilingual edition of Césaire’s original 1939 Notebook in 2013, edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman.

 

cesaire TBT

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And we are standing now, my country and I, hair in the wind,
my hand puny in its enormous fist and now the strength is not
in us but above us, in a voice that drills the night and the
hearing like the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp. And the
voice complains that for centuries Europe has force-fed us with
lies and bloated us with pestilence,
for it is not true that the work of man is done
that we have no business being on earth
that we parasite the world
that it is enough for us to heel to the world whereas the work
of man has only begun
and man still must overcome all the interdictions wedged in
the recesses of his fervor and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on
strength
and there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest
and we know now that the sun turns around our earth lighting
the parcel designated by our will alone and that every star falls
from sky to earth at our omnipotent command.

.

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE (1913–2008) was best known as the co-creator of the concept of négritude. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written at the end of World War II, became an anthem for Blacks around the world.

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of Aimé Césaire. He is the author of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader and translator of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. He was also the editor of Sulfur.

ANNETTE SMITH is an Emeritus Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. Besides publishing books and articles on various aspects of colonialism and racism, she has co-authored with Clayon Eshleman three previous translation of Aimé Césaire.

Anthology Film Archives (NYC) presents Robert Ryan

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“Robert Ryan: An Actor’s Actor”
Special screenings of films featuring Robert Ryan
Sept. 4–10 @ Anthology Film Archives 

 Jones comps.indd

A six-film Robert Ryan retrospective
in conjunction with The Lives of Robert Ryan (Wesleyan UP)

  • ACT OF VIOLENCE (Fred Zinnemann, 1948)
    September 4, 7:00 PM; September 6, 4:15 PM; September 8, 9:00 PM
  • ON DANGEROUS GROUND (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
    September 4, 9:00 PM; September 7, 7:00 PM; September 10, 7:00 PM
  • THE NAKED SPUR (Anthony Mann, 1953)
    September 5, 4:30 PM; September 7, 9:00 PM; September 9, 7:00 PM
  • BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (John Sturges, 1955)
    September 5, 9:15 PM; September 6, 9:00 PM; September 8, 7:00 PM

From September 4–10, Anthology Film Archives in New York will celebrate publication of The Lives of Robert Ryan with the retrospective series “Robert Ryan: An Actor’s Actor.” The series collects six of the most arresting screen performances by this gifted artist and activist, whom Martin Scorsese called “one of the greatest actors in the history of American film.” Select screenings will feature discussions with author J.R. Jones, film editor for the Chicago Reader, and Robert Ryan’s son, Cheyney Ryan, professor of law and philosophy at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford University.

The son of a Chicago construction executive with strong ties to the Democratic machine, Robert Ryan became a star after World War II on the strength of his menacing performance as an anti-Semitic murderer in the film noir Crossfire. Over the next quarter century he created a gallery of brooding, neurotic, and violent characters in such movies as Bad Day at Black Rock, Billy Budd, The Dirty Dozen, and The Wild Bunch. His riveting performances expose the darkest impulses of the American psyche during the Cold War.

At the same time, Ryan’s marriage to a liberal Quaker and his own sense of conscience launched him into a tireless career of peace and civil rights activism that stood in direct contrast to his screen persona. Drawing on unpublished writings and revealing interviews, Jones deftly explores the many contradictory facets of Ryan’s public and private lives, and how these lives intertwined in one of the most compelling actors of a generation.

Jones has recently spoken about The Lives of Robert Ryan at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs and at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. At the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, he presented a screening of Ryan’s boxing classic The Set-Up and took part in a discussion with Lisa Ryan, the actor’s daughter. The Lives of Robert Ryan is the featured book for July on Turner Classic Movies.

J.R. JONES is film editor for the Chicago Reader, where his work has appeared since 1996 and won multiple awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. A member of the National Society of Film Critics, Jones has also published work in the Chicago Sun-Times, New York Press, Kenyon Review, and Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000, edited by Peter Guralnick.

CHEYNEY RYAN is Human Rights Program Director at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford University, where he is engaged in a multi-year project exploring the relation of pacifism and nonviolence to contemporary just war theory. He has also taught at Harvard Law School, Northwestern University, and University of Oregon, where he is a professor emeritus. His most recent book is The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. AFA maintains a reference library containing the world’s largest collection of books, periodicals, stills, and other paper materials related to avant-garde cinema. It screens more than 900 programs annually, preserves an average of 25 films per year, publishes books and DVDs, and hosts numerous scholars and researchers.

Praise for The Lives of Robert Ryan:

“A masterly biography that portrays an actor devoted to his craft and dedicated to his personal convictions.” –Richard Dickey, Library Journal

“J.R. Jones in his excellent biography shows what a fascinating career [Ryan’s] was—complicated, contradictory, accidental. . . . As Jones demonstrates at considerable length, [Ryan] was a man of liberal principle and moral courage.” –Philip French, Sight & Sound 

“J.R. Jones’s meticulous, revealing book on Robert Ryan places the actor’s life and career against the turbulent politics of the Cold War and the red scare in Hollywood. Jones is especially adept in moving between the life and the work, the films and their contexts. He introduces political history throughout, in ways that are both relevant and revelatory.” –Foster Hirsch, author of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

“As self-effacing yet as solid and as ethically engaged as Robert Ryan himself, J.R. Jones offers a comprehensive and sensitive chronicle of one of the giants of American movie acting.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Movie Wars

Readercon Weekend–win a book!

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Readercon 26 is taking place this weekend, July9–12, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Returning conference-goers will be used to seeing Leslie Starr at our booth. Alas, Leslie is retiring! Our wonderful new marketing manager, Jaclyn Wilson, is on hand at our booth to answer questions. Please stop by to introduce yourself and check out our new books, including Five Weeks in a Balloon. You can watch a trailer about the book and enter to win a free copy here.

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This year, two of Readercon’s three Guests of Honor were published by Wesleyan: Gary K. Wolfe (who is sharing honors with Nicola Griffith) and Memorial Guest of Honor Joanna Russ.

Wolfe is the author of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature and contributed the introduction to our forthcoming book, Reality by Other Means: The Best Short Fiction of James Morrow. Wesleyan reissued two of Russ’s novels in 2005: We Who Are About To… (with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany) and The Two of Them (with a foreword by Sarah LaFanu). In addition, we published the critical volume On Joanna Russ, edited by Farah Mendlesohn, with contributors Andrew M. Butler, Brian Charles Clark, Samuel R. Delany, Edward James , Sandra Lindow, Keridwen Luis, Paul March-Russell, Helen Merrick, Dianne Newell, Graham Sleight, Jenéa Tallentire, Jason Vest, Sherryl Vint, Pat Wheeler, Tess Williams, Gary K. Wolfe, and Lisa Yaszek.

ReaderCon is full of useful panels and presentations for writers, scholars, editors, and readers. Day passes are available. To read more, please be sure to visit their website, http://readercon.org/. Have a wonderful conference!

Sarah Blake & Motion Poems

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Sarah Blake’s poem “A Day at the Mall Reminds Me of America” from her debut poetic collection Mr. West has been featured in a short film by Ayşe Altinok. MotionPoems “catalyzes the remix of poetry with other forms to create compelling hybrid artworks,” and it is a beautiful creation at that.

 

Watch this amazing film adaptation of the poem here. Both Sarah Blake and Ayşe Altinok have been interviewed about their parts in this work, found here.

A Day at the Mall Reminds Me of America

Recently, my 14 year old sister was approached at the mall to see if she’d be interested in working at Hollister, or Abercrombie and Fitch, or American Eagle. I can’t remember.

She’s that beautiful. And with the mall’s lights all around her—I can only imagine.

Yet on Facebook, one of her friends calls her a loser. More write, “I hate you.”

I wonder if Kanye knows that these girls are experimenting. As with rum. As with skin, all the ways to touch it.

My day at the mall begins with a Wild Cherry ICEE and an Auntie Anne’s Original Pretzel. A craving.

I pass women who you can tell are pregnant, and I know we all might be carrying daughters.

The mall is so quiet. The outside of the Hollister looks like a tropical hut, like the teenage girls should be sweating inside.

No one’s holding doors for me yet, but they will as I take the shape of my child.

And if my child has a vicious tongue, it will take shape lapping at my breast.

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SARAH BLAKE is the founder of the online writing tool Submittrs, an editor at Saturnalia Books, and a recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Drunken Boat, FIELD, and The Threepenny Review. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Click here for author’s website.

 

#tbt: Old Leather Man

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Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is from our 2008 book The Old Leather Man.

I first learned about the Old Leather Man around 15 years ago, when I worked for Arcadia Publishing. One day, after joining the staff here at Wesleyan, I was pleasantly surprised to see a proposal for an entire book on the subject. That book, The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend, has gone on to become one of our best-selling regional books. First published in 2008, it has maintained a steady stream of interest. The book and its author, Dan W. DeLuca, were recently the subject of a feature article, by Jon Campbell, in The Village Voice. It is wonderful to see Yann Legendre’s phantom-like interpretation of the mystery man gracing the cover of The Voice. It is not often that we see regional history and regional books receiving this kind of coverage!

 deluca_old-leather

The Old Leather Man, featured in The Village Voice. Our book, the newspaper, and some memorabilia are seen here.

Eddie Vedder, of Pearl Jam fame, happens to be a fan of the mystery man, and our book. Vedder wrote of our book on his band’s website. He said: “While this book offers up his life and times in the most complete manner possible, the mystery of Leather Man remains intact. It’s also interesting to note the parallels between the Leather Man and Chris McCandless who we got to know through Into the Wild.”

The spirit embodied by the Leather Man is universal. As Vedder pointed out, the desire to drop out of society and roam the world freely remains strong in our modern times. Who hasn’t day-dreamed about leaving it all behind and walking off into the woods?

from Connecticut Valley Advertiser, Saturday, December 27, 1873

The veritable “Old Leather Man” paid our village another visit last week. It has long been a query who he is, where he comes from, and where he stays nights. With the juveniles, the latter query is the most important, and for their gratification, more particularly we can inform them that his home is in a cave, in what is known as Elijah’s ledges, in the west part of the town of Westbrook. In this lonely place he makes a home when he wanders this way. The cave is small and does not compare very favorably, either in size or gorgeousness, with the famous “Cave of the Winds” at Moodus. This queer specimen of humanity, clothed in leather, is indeed a curiosity. He is very reticent, only conversing when necessity compels it in soliciting food. It is not known where he came from, but it is generally supposed that he escaped from some Dime Novel.

Not everyone was happy about visits from Old Leathery and his kind.

from Bristol Press, Thursday, August 26, 1875

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp

There would appear to be no immediate prospect of abatement of the tramp nuisance. Rather, the tramp seems to have become ubiquitous and the growth of his order is only equaled by its capacity for villainy and “general cussedness.” The few mild measures taken in some sections for the suppression of this dangerous class have proved wholly inoperative, thus far. How long the community at large will continue to bear the inflictions before resorting to a more vigorous and wholesome treatment is difficult to determine. From the way in which people permit themselves to be imposed upon and cowed into acquiescence with all that these rascals insolently demand, we should judge that this is a sort of tramps’ millennium and is to be of indefinite duration. At any rate the tramps are increasing and with their multiplication, robbery, incendiarism, intimidation, rape and murder in like ratio become more and more common.

This tramp nuisance will continue just so long as people submit to it and no longer. The remedy is within reach. It is a simple remedy, easily applied. It may appear to some to be harsh, but if people would be rid of the evil, they must first make up their minds that harsh measures are the only ones that can be made effective. In the first place, stop feeding tramps. Secondly, let every man, woman and youth learn how to use a revolver and have one or more of these useful articles in every house, especially if in an isolated situation. Then whenever a tramp appears, peremptorily refuse him food or shelter and escort him off the premises at the muzzle of a cocked revolver and if he isn’t easily scared and attempts force, shoot.

A trusty weapon in every house and a disposition to use it on very slight provocation, will do more to squelch this abomination than any other means possible to use. And when people drop their squeamishness and sickly philanthropy and all other classes of criminals with that promptness and fidelity which is possible only by taking the law into their own hands, the moral atmosphere will improve wonderfully and life, property and virtue will be properly respected.

Yet others took pity on this lost soul, and were happy to feed him.

from Connecticut Valley Advertiser, Saturday, December 4, 1875

The old veteran leather man passed through this place on Thursday last, and as usual, he stopped at the house of W. B. Starkey, on South Blood street, and partook of hot coffee, cake, pie, etc., as he has done for the past twenty years. He makes his trips every six weeks. He is always on time and never fails.

Sadly, the man who seemingly had no name died a rather painful death from cancer of the mouth.

from Evening News, Friday, January 25, 1889

The Leather Man in Redding

The Leather Man was in Redding and called early in the morning at the residence of Dr. J. H. Benedict, where he asked for a breakfast. He was readily recognized by Mrs. Benedict from his leather clothing, and she invited him into the kitchen. As Mrs. Benedict can speak French she soon learned his wants, which were simply coffee, and she furnished him with all he desired. He drank the full of two large bowls, into each of which he put a teacupful of sugar.

He explained that he was unable to partake of solid food on account of his cancer, which prevented chewing. He conversed for a short time with Mrs. Benedict in French, until she asked him of his antecedents and then he became suddenly and stubbornly silent and spoke in his broken English.

His cancer is rapidly eating away his life. The right cheek is entirely gone, including a portion of the lower lip. He would not allow Dr. Benedict to dress it or Mrs. Benedict to do anything for his comfort, save to give him the coffee and a bottle of milk.

He now seems very shaky and is evidently drawing near his end. It seems as if the Humane Society should look after him, and care for him, even if it was necessary to do so by force, or else some day he will be found a corpse in some out of the way place, the victim of a-craze, want, neglect and exposure.

 

In the end, the Leather Man died alone. His death was reported in the Hartford Times, on Monday evening, March 25, 1889. The headline read:

“The Old Leather Man” Gone
FOUND DEAD IN A CAVE
a great sufferer from cancer

 

OldLeatherManSmall  

 

 

 

At Left: The Old Leather Man, photographer and location unknown. Courtesy of the Plymouth Historical Soicety.

 

 

César Vallejo, cuatro paredes de la celda / Four Walls of the Cell

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Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is from César Vallejo’s Trilce, first published in Peru in 1922, the year after the poet spent 105 days in prison for allegedly instigating a partisan skirmish in his hometown, Santiago de Chuco. Trilce is still considered one of the most radical Spanish-language avant-garde poetry collections ever written. Wesleyan’s edition of the book was translated by Clayton Eshleman and published in 2000. Eshleman was awarded a National Book Award for his co-translation of The Complete Posthumous Poetry, and was a Griffin Prize finalist for The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. A voluminous edition of Vallejo’s writing is newly available from Wesleyan: Selected Writings of César Vallejo. This new collection, edited by Joseph Mulligan, contains some poetry and a vast number of prose pieces translated to English for the first time. There are articles documenting Vallejo’s travels in Soviet Russia, personal correspondences, and excerpts from several of his plays as well as from his his novel El tungsteno / Tungsten, a work addressing the oppression of indigenous Peruvian miners.

 Selected-Trilce

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From Trilce

XVIII

    Oh las cuatro paredes de la celda.
Ah las cuatro paredes albicantes
que sin remedio dan al mismo número.    

    Criadero de nervios, mala brecha,
por sus cuatro rincones cómo arranca
las diarias aherrojadas extremidades.

     Amorosa llavera de innumerables llaves,
si estuvieras aqui, si vieras hasta
qué hora son cuatro estas paredes.
Contra ellas seríamos contigo, los dos,
más dos que nunca. Y ni lloraras,
di, libertadora!

     Ah las paredes de la celda.
De ellass me duelen entre tanto, más
las dos largas que tienen esta noche
algo de madres que ya muertas
llevan por bromurados declives,
a un niño de Ia mano cada una.

     Y sólo yo me voy quedando,
con la diestra, que hace por ambas manos,
en alto, en busca de terciario brazo
que ha de puilar, entre mi donde y mi cuando,
esta mayoría inválida de hombre.

 XVIII

     Oh the four walls of the cell.
Ah the four bleaching walls
that inevitably face the same number.

     Breeding place for nerves, foul breach,
through its four corners how it snatches at
the daily shackled extremities.

     Loving keeper of innumerable keys,
if only you were here, if only you could only see unto
what hour these walls remain four.
Against them we would be with you, the two of us,
more two than ever. And you wouldn’t even cry,
speak, liberator!

     Ah the walls of the cell.
Meanwhile of those that hurt me, most
the two long ones that tonight are
somehow like mothers now dead
leading a child through
bromowalled inclines by the hand.

     And only I hang on,
with my right, serving for both hands,
raised, in search of a tertiary arm
to pupilize, between my where and my when,
this invalid majority of a man.

CÉSAR VALLEJO (1892–1938) was born in the Peruvian Andes and, after publishing some of the most radical Latin American poetry of the twentieth century, moved to Europe, where he diversified his writing practice to encompass theater, fiction, and reportage. As an outspoken alternative to the European avant-garde, Vallejo stands as one of the most authentic and multifaceted creators to write in the Castilian language.

Announcing “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle” from Gina Athena Ulysse

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Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. Her complex yet singular aim in Why Haiti Needs New Narratives is to make sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty and being in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). This collection contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D. G. Kelley.

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Gina Athena Ulysse is an associate professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University. Born in Haiti, she has lived in the United States for over thirty years. A performance artist, multimedia artist, and anthropologist, she is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Robin D. G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor of History and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History at UCLA.

“Five years after the earthquake that razed Haiti, feminist anthropologist Ulysse reclaims the cultural narrative of her homeland from its simplification and distortion by mainstream news coverage. In her trilingual (English, Kreyòl, French) collection of op-eds, essays, reviews and news articles…Ulysse rejects the colonial framework through which Haiti is often viewed and reasserts the validity of its sovereignty.”
–Ms. Magazine, Spring 2015

The Driftless Connecticut Series is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress/driftless.

Praise for Why Haiti Needs New Narratives:

“Ulysse’s clear, powerful writing rips through the stereotypes to reveal a portrait of Haiti in politics and art that will change the way you think about that nation’s culture, and your own.”
—Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“This is a beautifully written and profoundly important work of engaged anthropology. Gina Ulysse steps bravely into the public domain bringing a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of things Haitian to a large group of general readers as well as to a broad audience of scholars. Publication of this book marks a kind of “coming of age” for anthropological bloggers and public anthropology.”
—Paul Stoller, author of Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World

“Gina Athena Ulysse’s compilation, Why Haiti needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle, is the gut-felt testimony of an insider/outsider that resounds as a thunderclap in the desert. Trapped in the alienating context of sterile academia, neoliberal political economy, populations displaced, shock therapy and general geopolitical shifts, the author’s gift of polysemy opens horizons. Through thought, action, word, poetry, song . . . flow yet unbounded prospects.”
—Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, professor, Université d’Etat d’Haïti

“Taking us through entangled and liberating possibilities, Gina Ulysse introduces us to Haiti, the kingdom of this world. Embedded in the interstices of words and other aesthetic sensibilities that summon the past into the present, the powerful promise of a people is revealed. Ashe.”
—Arlene Torres, coeditor of Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean

“The sense of urgency that pervades these essays is palpable. Similar to her performances, Ulysse rings the alarm, fills the room in our head with deafening sound, a one-woman aftershock.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, from the foreword